The top 3 things you need to know about our new Wellness program.

1. We have a new partner

Virgin Pulse purchased ShapeUp in 2016. As the new partner for myWellness, they have numerous enhanced functions compared to the previous platform and are the leading vendor in their class. Northwell Health is passionate about keeping our employees and the communities we serve, safe and well. The new myWellness program is an excellent tool to support total well-being based on upgrades to content and resource accessibility. The best part about registering for the new platform? A free personal activity tracker along with a robust mobile app for easy access to tracking on personal devices.

“We believe that caring for our patients begins with caring for our people. We strive to offer resources such as myWellness to support our vision of the healthiest workforce in healthcare.”

-Niha Malcomson, Manager, Employee Wellness

2. It provides so much more

The new myWellness platform is highly interactive. Each day, members earn rewards points daily for tracking healthy habits like hours slept, steps, drinking water and much more. The refreshed program incorporates three basic steps to support behavior change to help employees reach their wellness goals. Step 1: Get specific. Step 2: Make it easy. Step 3: Trigger the behavior. When we focus on building tiny habits, we increase the likelihood of making lasting change. All of our employees are encouraged to take the 100% confidential, voluntary Health Risk Assessment to receive feedback on their current well-being status and to drive the creation of personalized content in the myWellness program. Personal challenges – ranging from getting more steps to tracking sleep with friends on the platform – are easy to create and yield additional ways to earn reward points. The PROGRAMS page on myWellness is a valuable tool for employees to centrally access a wide range of health and well-being resources available to them throughout Northwell Health.

3. And our employees are pumped

Since the launch of the upgraded myWellness program on August 1, there are nearly 25,000 Northwell Health employees registered, and the number continues to grow each day. Approximately 45% of the registered users were registered in the previous platform, the remainder are new users of myWellness. The interactivity and gamification, customized content, individual and enterprise-wide challenges, will all play a role in keeping employees engaged with their health through this program. Our partner, Virgin Pulse, also provides content updates periodically throughout the year to keep the content fresh.

Keeping our employees happy and healthy is one of our top priorities. We understand that the balance between work, life, wellness, and everything else is a tricky one, and we want our employees to feel support within each area. That’s why our employee wellness team continues to enhance our programs and will be on the road visiting sites throughout September and October encouraging our employees to take the next step in their health and to join our newly refreshed platform.

A healthy employee is a happy employee. Did you know that each year we have Wellness Challenges for our employees to keep track of their personal health? These challenges involve tracking your healthy and unhealthy habits, reducing stress, or simply encouraging you to move around more. Last year at our annual employee barbeque our President and CEO, Michael J. Dowling, awarded prizes to the challenge winners who were all secretly hoping to win the grand prize, a trip to any one of our seven destination options, ranging from Peru to China to Thailand.

Last year alone, Mr. Dowling handed out 14 prizes to employees who completed all 3 challenges. One winner, Imee Sarmiento, recently took her trip to Rome with her husband. Wanting to get in on the fun, Imee’s sister Lulette (who also works for the health system) decided to plan a trip at the same time.

Throughout their trip, they got to visit many famous cities such as Florence and Siena, but one sight they didn’t expect to see under the Tuscan sun was former United States President Barak Obama and the Air Force One Leaving the Rome Airport.

“Winning this trip was an incredible experience! It was an enticing incentive for employees to promote health and wellness as well as encourage camaraderie amongst its employees,” said Imee. These sisters have been a part of our nursing family for 14 and 20 years respectively.

“We don’t really know any company that granted their employees any wellness challenges and incentives such as the experience we just had. It’s amazing and totally reinforced Northwell Health’s dedication to be a forefront in leading and promoting employee satisfaction,” said Lulette.

Here at Northwell Health, we are always looking out for the health of our employees. Our wellness initiatives not only allow our employees to maintain their health outside the workplace, but while working as well. Over the past few years, we have continued to put the health of our employees first by providing healthy food options at the cafeterias throughout our facilities and snack options in our vending machines. So far these challenges have helped hundreds of employees lose weight and change their lifestyle.